game with his audience. It’s actually intriguing how he feels the need
to chop his reality up into chunks,
as if he is watching through a jagged kaleidoscope, but he reserves
the lifeline of stepping to the other
side of the looking glass where reality starts and is preserved, albeit
for the wall’s eyes only.
George is no amateur at arts:
he graduated in Fine Art at London Metropolitan University and
subsequently worked at an art
gallery in the Serpentine for three
years, before pursuing a career
change and accepting a job with
Camden-based gaming company
Betclic. When they relocated to
Gibraltar three years ago, he faced
the choice of returning to his Welsh
hometown, Abergavenny, or following his employer.
And here he is, painting sundrenched landscapes which go
down a treat with customers of the
prestigious East London gallery
DegreeArt which represents him.
“Two of my paintings were sold
somewhere exotic in the Caribbean. They were part of my final
university work, a collection of five
canvases, separate but interconnected to form a ‘bigger picture’.
Of course galleries don’t disclose
their customers to safeguard their
own role as middle man between
artists and collectors, but I was
quite pleased to hear my work had
travelled that far.”
George’s paintings are well
travelled in more than one way,
since he is now working on his
impressions of touring Vietnam
and Thailand. With a full-time
job and slow-drying oils, continuity and concentration need to
be juggled with work and social
commitments. He is fortunate
enough to have a home studio
with plenty of ventilation for
what his website describes as ‘the
structural, buttery, timely drying
process’ of his style that aims to
create surfaces ‘being dominated
in a workman-like body of heavily
cemented paint’.
His early work however was

Cadiz

arts focus

flat and paint was not exuberant.
Furthermore, the style differs considerably from the direction his art
has taken recently: he started off
with charcoal sketches from busy
places, like train stations or public
squares, capturing a varied and
intermingling humanity, preoccupied with their daily commute
or long-haul flights, all rigorously
faceless or facing away from the
portrayer.
Some pencil sketches evolved
into oil paintings, like Liverpool
Street Station (2006), a maze of
brown faces, red or blue clothing
outlined in slick black, with the focal point cast on the grey staircase
at the top right corner of the composition. These colours return in
Sierra Nevada Ski Lift (2012), a series
of Stratford Landscapes (2009) and
Edinburgh City Castle View (2010).
His more recent works cherishes
mint and moss greens, bright and
saturated sky blues, powder pinks

and dramatic splashes of scarlet
red, jet black and mustard brown
(Cadiz, 2013).
Obsession for texture has inspired George with a new project:
close-up photos of his works to
highlight depth and layering,
mixture of colours and brushstroke
directions, forsaking the subject

matters’ relevance in favour of his
reverence for the medium, enjoying a life of its own. n
For information on prices and
commissions, please visit www.
georgelwilliams.com, follow @george_
artist on Twitter or like his Facebook page
GeorgeWilliamsArt.

GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE • MARCH 2014

46-47-_mar.indd 47

Gibraltar Side Street

With a fulltime job and
slow-drying oils,
continuity and
concentration
need to be
juggled with
work and social
commitments
47